"A new generation of heavy haul vehicles will cut carbon pollution, clean up the air, and improve truckers' lives"
"The charging yard for electric trucks at the Port of Long Beach is bright and sunny and full of semitrailer tractors—the truncated front ends of big rigs without their big-box loads. It’s also quiet. Elsewhere at the port, wherever there are trucks, there’s the near-deafening rumble of diesel engines. But the trucks here aren’t combusting; they’re filling up with electrons to power their next trip to Southern California’s Inland Empire, the constellation of cities to the east with one of the heaviest concentrations of warehouses in the world.
To Louis Cardona, a port trucker for the past 10 years, that silence is the best part of driving an electric truck. The diesel-engine roar goes on pretty much all day because port trucking, also known as drayage, is mostly about waiting—for entry through the port’s security gates, for loads to be lowered down by towering gantry cranes from massive container ships, for traffic to move on permanently congested Southern California roads. “If you turn the engine off, it always gets really hot,” Cardona says, so it’s a choice between sweltering and enduring a noise that can exceed 100 decibels, 10 points higher than the legal limit for workplaces.
If California didn’t have grand climate ambitions, Cardona would be stuck with noisy diesel. But he now has a choice of what to drive, because state regulators decreed that by 2035, only zero-emission trucks will be allowed to work the state’s seaports. The regulation is key to California’s attempts to cut its carbon pollution. Nationally, transportation accounts for nearly one-third of carbon emissions, and heavy-duty trucking is responsible for a quarter of that, adding more than 400 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the earth’s atmosphere every year. Trucks emit more locally damaging pollutants too, like particulate matter from their diesel engines, which infiltrates human lungs and causes a host of ailments for people in port communities. Decarbonizing freight matters more than just about anything else in the fight to stabilize the climate and protect human health."
Judith Lewis Mernit reports for Sierra magazine with photos by Alisha Jucevic September 3, 2024.
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